How gaming became sexist: a study of UK gaming magazines 1981-1995
Graeme Kirkpatrick, University of Manchester
Published on-line first in Media, Culture & Society, April 30th 2016.
Abstract
Computer gaming was not born sexist but was codified as an exclusively male practice as it peeled itself away from the rest of the burgeoning computer culture in the mid-1980s. This article traces the development of gaming’s gender bias through a discourse analysis of gaming magazines published in the UK between 1981 and 1995. In their early years (1981-1985) these publications present a milieu that was reflective on gender issues and concerned to include female participants. However, after 1986 the rhetorical framing of computer games, gaming and gamer performance was increasingly gender exclusive and focused on the re-enforcement of stereotypically masculine values, albeit that much of this discourse had a humorous and ironic inflection. The paper presents this as the gender-biased articulation of gaming discourse. Instead of viewing the gendering of computer games as something they inherited from previous kinds of games and activities, the article argues that the political economy of the gaming industry in the second half of the 1980s created specific conditions under which games and gaming were coded as exclusively masculine.
Keywords
Gaming culture; magazines; gender; computers; technology and society
Introduction
The recent #Gamergate controversy demonstrated that computer gaming culture has ongoing associations with misogyny and that, for many, gaming remains a male preserve. This is, perhaps, the dominant image of gaming in mainstream culture: it involves young males attuned to the values of aggressive competition and entertained by scenes of bloody mass death and carnage. In fact, the history of gaming shows its association with these stereotypes of masculine predilection is discontinuous (and often over-stated). Setting aside the fact that many females enjoy blasting the occasional alien, the cultural codification of computer games as a violent masculine activity can be traced to a specific phase in their development. In this article I argue that gaming discourse, which emerges with the development of a game-specific evaluative argot in the mid-1980s[1], was subject to a gendered principle of articulation from 1986-9. It was from this time that gaming acquired its distinctive masculine codification.
In a pioneering essay by Henry Jenkins (2000) core features of the game object are identified as being largely continuous with ‘traditional’ boys’ play. Computer games facilitate exploration of space, free roaming and playful combat – all well established elements in male socialization. Moreover, agonistic games and technology have both long been male-dominated pursuits. Judy Wajcman observes that “many of the most popular games are simply programmed versions of traditionally male non-computer games”, with their “themes of adventure and violence” (2006: 87). These apparent continuities might justify suspicion of computer games as merely a recent episode in an old story – it is obvious that they are for boys and men.
However, this view has been criticized as contributing to the invisibility of women who are and always have been involved in the games industry as producers (Nooney 2013) and players (Taylor 2006). As Dovey and Kennedy (2006) point out, the presence of female gamers has not been reflected in the culture around gaming and this has affected game designs, which routinely contain heavily sexualized female characters and other elements likely to deter female participation (Kennedy 2002; Royse et al 2007). This kind of bias is manifest in game designs but it is primarily the effect of a contingent culture. The research described here identifies a key turning point in the history of this cultural framing of games.
When computer games were new they demanded an effort of interpretation: it was not clear who should play them, or why, or even how. This was remedied by the development of ways of talking about games that singled them out from the myriad software that circulated in the 1980s culture of ‘home computing’ (Haddon 1988). A discourse was produced that made computer games familiar and facilitated their evaluation according to standards specific to them (Kirkpatrick 2012). It was only relatively late in this process that it became essential that the authentic gamer should be male. This was not determined by either the gameness of the games or their technological character but was the effect of a determinate inscription of the social and cultural field that can only be properly understood with reference to changes to the technical and economic context of game production in the second half of the 1980s. It was in the entwinement of the burgeoning gaming culture with commercial strategies of games producers that games were codified as male[2].
Gaming magazines published in Britain in the 1980s were key mediators in this process. It seems there were no comparable publications on games anywhere in the world at this time[3], for reasons that are discussed further below. The period 1982-5 is neglected in existing scholarship largely because these were the years of a crash in the US gaming industry. The dominant historical narrative (See Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009: 14; Malliet and de Meyer 2005: 34) casts these as the lean years of gaming, with the industry re-booting only after Nintendo launched their Famicom console in Autumn 1986 (it came to the United Kingdom a year later). However, this account overlooks the fact that gaming was not only alive and well in Britain and elsewhere but was actually taking decisive first steps towards winning autonomy as a cultural practice, with its own terminology, values and institutions. The British gaming press was a key actor here. The magazines discussed here were crucibles for the production of gaming discourse.
In these magazines we can observe how gaming established itself as a cultural practice with its own legitimating values. Sexism and gender bias in the rhetoric around games can be dated to the period 1987-1989, which precedes and coincides with Nintendo’s arrival on the scene. This codification is not passively inherited from other domains but actively produced through a specific articulation gaming discourse. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this. The contingency of the male claim over games means that it can be undone without shedding the normative and evaluative criteria distinctive to gaming culture[4].
The first section, ‘The magazines and their analysis’ presents a description of the magazines and an account of the thematic discourse analysis applied to them. The next section describes changes to the context of game production and relates this to changes in the way that computer games were framed and mediated in the magazines between 1981 and 1985. It describes how game producers sought to manage their risks by concentrating on a well- defined constituency with clear tastes and preferences, while the magazines helped coalesce such a community. The third section, ‘The gendering of gaming discourse: 1987–1989’ describes how from the end of 1986 a discernible shift occurs in the way that the magazines framed and positioned gaming as a gendered activity. In 1987, games were increasingly presented in ways that were likely to deter girls and women from playing and which ignored the contributions of female participants. The fourth section, ‘Positioning games as a male domain’ shows how the evaluation of gamer performance became inflected with values that aligned gaming with youthful masculinity. This change in the rhetorics of gaming had a disciplinary function for male players, with poor players disparaged as lacking in masculine virtue. In conclusion, the article argues that the articulation of gaming culture to exclusionary values is an outcome of the entwinement of gaming culture’s growing autonomy with economic interests coming to dominate games production.
1. The magazines and their analysis
The magazines analysed in this study were Computer and Video Games (hereafter CVG), which ran from 1981-95, Commodore User (CU, 1983-1990), which was published between 1983-1990 and Zzap! (1985-1995). CVG was initially the most popular of the magazines, selling around 80–100,000 copies each month at its height in the middle of the decade. Zzap! seems to have peaked at around 45,000 per month in early 1988 (Kimines n.d.). CU sold in smaller numbers, perhaps reaching 40,000 monthly sales in 1985, but could still claim a significant readership in the computing community until its demise in 1990.
The production of these magazines reflected the fact that when home computers were sold in the UK for the first time[5] most people who bought them had little idea what they were for. Indeed, their manufacturers prevaricated over whether the machines were aids to financial management, educational devices, or entertainment technology. The magazines can be read as part of a conversation aimed at answering this question. To illustrate, in CU 1, September 1983, there is a report about the ‘Virgin Fun Bus’, which toured the UK with 12 varieties of home computer, 8 game programs, other software and a team of programmers. The magazine reports that Virgin want to “show kids what computers are really about”, but the reporter is skeptical, writing that, “we’d like to know too” (CU 1, p.6). The magazines can be read as part of a conversation aimed at answering this question.
They all covered general computing issues, describing programming projects, identifying bugs in commercial software, providing shortcuts and solutions, as well as games. It bears emphasis, though, that from their inception, all of them were as concerned with games as with generic computing and this distinguished them from other computer games of the time. This is clear from the title of CVG but is also true of CU. The latter’s second issue introduced “a new regular spot – our intrepid band of wild eyed reviewers take to the joystick and zap along with the latest offerings from your favourite and not-so favourite gamespeople” (CU 2, p.3). Over the next few issues the number of games reviewed grows rapidly and, like its rival, the magazine is increasingly dominated by drawings and images of scenes from games. CVG and CU pioneered games reviewing, although Zzap! developed the art when it entered the scene a few years later.
As it became clear that the biggest selling home computers were to be used for playing games (Selwyn 2002), so the magazines became hubs for the emergence of a new community. In their pages we can trace the process through which computers and computing, and then games, gaming and gamers were positioned in the wider culture. Changes to the rhetorical and discursive framing of games were manifest in the editorial pieces, which related news about the industry; software reviews, which evaluated new games and (initially at least) other programs, and ‘letters’ pages in which readers expressed their views, asked questions and participated in shaping a community of interest. The research presented here is based a process of reading the magazines and subjecting them to a thematic discourse analysis.
Thematic discourse analysis is a broad term and the range of methods it can encompass is notoriously diffuse (Robson, 2002: 365). What is common to uses of the method, however, is a concern with language and representation. The method is critical in that there is a presumption that ‘surface’ level significations are made possible by underlying structural conditions. Thematic analysis works by inferring the presence of such structures from changes in the order of the surface phenomena. Hence, an increased density of references to ‘gameplay’ in reviews, for instance, can be taken to indicate a structural shift in the way that games programmes are being received and understood, which is manifest in the new way of talking about them (Kirkpatrick, 2012).
The analysis was guided by the question of how a female interested in computer games in the early 1980s might have felt if the magazines were her chosen way to develop that interest. The research described here identified and recorded the following kinds of statement in the magazines:
· Sexist or exclusionary statements, which might range from overt assertions that these objects are ‘for’ boys or men to comments that simply rest on that assumption;
· Reflective statements, indicating that the issue of gender inclusivity is an issue the author (be they editor, reporter or correspondent) is concerned with;
· Statements that entailed a gender-normative construction of gamer performance, perhaps by aligning good gameplay with some other virtue with an overt masculine connotation.
This method serves to filter of magazine content, making it possible to chart changes in tone and emphasis that characterize the development of gaming discourse in relation to the question of gender and female participation. Close scrutiny of the statements allows one to infer or hypothesize deeper structural shifts, which can then be confirmed or rejected by referring to the wider context.
The main context in question here was the development of gaming as a discrete cultural practice or field (Bourdieu, 1993) with its own norms and values. An important reason for focusing on the magazines is that they do not merely reflect changes in the representation of games and gaming but were active participants in creating the new culture. They developed ways of representing games and their players that made sense of gaming for their readers. The relationship implied here between magazines and their readers is an example of what Michel Foucault called a ‘“truth game” that human beings use to understand themselves’ (cited in Bertrand and Hughes, 2005: 167). The method of thematic discourse analysis aims at tracing the effects of these interactions, to identify what possibilities they generated and which they closed off. It was through such a sequence of discursive moves that games and gaming came to be constructed as ‘for’ boys and men, even in face of the facts of female participation.